


An Improbable Possibility

by doctor_jasley



Category: Cinderella-Grimms, Den lille Havfrue | The Little Mermaid - Hans Christian Andersen, Fairytales, La Belle et la Bête | Beauty and the Beast
Genre: Background Character Death, Community: zombiebang, Gen, Zombies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-13
Updated: 2012-02-13
Packaged: 2017-10-31 03:27:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,341
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/339366
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doctor_jasley/pseuds/doctor_jasley
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the west, a beautiful maiden has just wed her beloved. He’s handsome and no longer the cursed beast who terrified the neighboring villagers just months before.<br/>In the East, a blond woman wakes up under the tree planted next to her mother’s grave. The most wonderful dream is still playing around with her thoughts.<br/>In the South, a teenager slowly pulls herself up onto an ocean slick rock. Her arms are shaking and weak. She’s exhausted and wrung out.<br/>Everything they've known is about to change.<br/>When the zombie apocalypse occurs, each fights to survive in a world that shouldn't even exist in fairytales. In the end, finding each other is the silver lining that keeps them alive and moving.</p>
            </blockquote>





	An Improbable Possibility

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for 2010's zombie bang challenge. Epic artwork by Calamityclam is offline at the moment. Will link when a working link is available.

Each and every story that has ever existed begins and ends. In the middle there’s some form of rising action before the tension crackles and burns everything down, kindling all the pieces together into the resolution. Sometimes though, fate is fickle and throws all the stories’ pieces into the air for the wind to scatter.

This is where we begin.

*~*~*~*~*  
In the west, a beautiful maiden has just wed her beloved. He’s handsome and no longer the cursed beast who terrified the neighboring villagers just months before. She loves him with all her heart, but when she goes to turn in his arms to face the wedding procession she sees a figure skitter by in the background before pitching into members of the wedding, and it twists her attention away from him. A feeling of dread crawls up onto her shoes and starts to shake itself up onto the frills of her wedding gown. She pushes away from her prince and almost falls to her knees. There are screams in the back of the church and people are beginning to panic. Her prince is calling her name over and over again.

“Belle, Belle”

But she doesn’t hear him.

*~*~*~*~*  
In the east, a blond woman wakes up under the tree planted next to her mother’s grave. The most wonderful dream is still playing around with her thoughts. The rags that hang off her thin frame do nothing to tame the stunning grin that’s tripping across her lips. She went to The Ball last night, and it was wonderful. Getting up, she spins under the tree, twirling her ragged dress in the slight breeze that’s singing through the air and twining with the notes of joy slipping from her tongue. Last night wasn’t a dream and perhaps tonight will be even better; the little birds are ever so nice. 

After a moment, she stops twirling and notices a figure on the horizon. It’s backlit in shadows. The silhouette reminds her of her dead father until it begins to slouch and stutter walk in her general direction. Something’s wrong. In the distance behind her, she hears her step mother yell for her. She jumps and startles because her stepmother isn’t just yelling her name. She’s screaming it.

“Cinderella!”

*~*~*~*~*

In the South, a teenager slowly pulls herself up onto an ocean slick rock. Her arms are shaking and weak. She’s exhausted and wrung out. Images of the sea floor, painted in grays and reds that keep getting swirled about by the sea’s current, jump behind her eyelids whenever she closes them. Her family is dead. Everyone is dead, the last of them getting together to offer their souls to the sea witch for her life. 

And here she is, human, with human legs that don’t seem to work right. She is stranded only several feet from the shore, and she can’t swim anymore for now. She’s safe up here. None of them followed her up to the surface. The scenes of horror are all trapped down in the deep. 

The sound of erratic barking draws her attention to the shore line. She watches as the brown blur of a dog shoots across the sand only to be brought down by a man and woman moments later. It’s hard to tell from the rocks, but she’s pretty sure they’re eating the dog. She swam all this way. Her family died to get her here and it’s the same up on the surface as it was down there. She screams. 

“……”

Or tries to. It’s hard for her to scream when she no longer has any voice to scream with.

*~*~*~*~*

Belle wakes to the sound of bird song chipping loudly in her ears. She’s stiff everywhere and her clothing hangs off her body in chunks. What is left of her wedding gown is stained several shades of red and brown. She’ll have to find more suitable clothes soon. 

The sun is a bright, burning dot hanging up in the sky when she goes to climb down the tree that became her bed chamber for the night. She sees no one during her walk to a tiny pool of clear water. Her reflection stares back at her while she drinks. It is pale and washed out. 

She splashes at her reflection to get it to shatter. Belle doesn’t need to see her face to know she is dirty and still covered in the gore of her friends and family. There has been no time to wash up and press cloth clean. She has been wandering for weeks now, through abandoned villages and towns. Perhaps she should have donned a new dress when she was barricaded in a deserted tavern three nights ago. That night though, she was running from imaginary demons shrouded in the guise of her beloved prince and her elderly father. She was far too distraught to even think about eating then.

The next two days pass by quickly. She sees no signs of the shuffling people who don’t speak and drip blood in their wake. They are terrifying, and Belle tries her best not to think about them or if her husband is one of those things now. She had no heart to bash his head in when he went for her throat after their wedding night fell apart. 

The dress she finally changes into is thin and won’t help her during the winter months, but it cinches around her waist tightly and doesn’t hang low enough to catch on anything. Nor is there anything much for the shuffling people to grab onto. Along with the dress, she now carries a light pack filled with wax wheeled cheeses and skins of fresh water. Hopefully, she’ll find safe harbor in the east.

*~*~*~*~*

Cinderella watches the figure in the distance get closer and closer before she pulls out of her shock and runs for the house. The kitchen door smacks against the stone of the wall when she trips into it. Her feet tangle up and she slams down onto the packed, dusty floor of the kitchen doorway. 

There are smudges of blood soaking into the ground. The stray dog she sometimes feeds is hiding in the soot of the hearth’s wooden remains. It growls at her when she tries to coax it out from her usual bedding. Its teeth snap at her hand when she gets too close. It’s hurt and there is blood leaking up into its fur, matting the blondish, golden coat a sickly shade of dirty black and red.

The sound of glass shattering and a shriek pulls Cinderella up to her feet. She needs to find her stepmother and stepsisters. They are the only family she has left, even if they act like she is nothing more than the ash that floats under their crisply shined shoes. The stairs are littered with broken pieces of pottery and the torn canvasses of butchered paintings. With quick steps, she moves around the debris in time to see one of her stepsisters’ chase the other across the hallway that opens up directly in front of the top of the staircase.

She goes to rush up the rest of the stairs and gets tripped up by the stray dog. It growls at her again, as if to tell her to stay put, before darting up the rest of the stairs and sitting down heavy on the top step. Its body bristling and tense like it is protecting her. She watches from the staircase as one stepsister crashes into the other and they both go down on the rug her father bought her mother right before her death. 

The scream is loud and makes her ears ring when it reaches her. Her stepsister is making shrieking, screaming noises that carry no verbal inclinations with them. They are just consonants bubbling up and bursting over their heads. It takes Cinderella minutes to realize that one stepsister is ripping the other apart limb by limb. The moment she does, her body lurches to the side and everything she ate the night before comes up and splats on the cloth runners sliding down the edges of the steps. 

Her retching must catch the attention of her stepsister, because when she looks up her stepsister starts to raise from the corpse of her other stepsister. The stray bolts up to its feet and growls, low and menacing, at her stepsister. Cinderella stumbles up and tries to back away, tries to go down the stairs and just leave. But she can’t. Standing at the foot of the stairs is the prince.

He looks nothing like he did the night before. His royal finery is soaked in blood and something oozy and green that drips from the fingers of his left hand. His head is twisted on his neck wrong, and when he goes to take a step forward his right leg drags. It leaves a lurid slur of gore on the floor, and all she can think about is how hard it is to get blood out of the fine fabrics of the rugs her father bought before his death. 

At the top of the stairs, the stray rams right into the unsteady legs of her undead stepsister. Her stepsister falls against the railing of the landing before pitching over the side. Her body makes a crunching, thump of a noise. Cinderella cringes at the sound and her body shivers. The prince’s attention swivels in the direction of her stepsister, who is twitching and slowly crawling back up onto her feet. One ankle is broken and Cinderella can hear it when the bone snaps completely. Her stepsister’s hair puffs up around her as she loses balance and starts to fall. Before she can hit the ground, the prince tackles her to the floor hard. 

Without stopping to watch them, Cinderella runs down the stairs and stumbles out of the kitchen. Instead of walking towards the castle, she moves in the direction of the forest. If the prince was coming from the castle then there is no telling what is happening there. She doesn’t want to know. 

The stray trots up to her and butts the back of her leg with its head. A glance behind her shows the tree at her mother’s grave bathing in the morning sun. It’s missing a branch. Cinderella knows her mother won’t mind if her daughter uses one of the tree’s many limbs as a walking stick. It might also help her defend herself if she comes across anymore should be dead people. 

*~*~*~*~*

Water sloshes against her face. She has tripped again. Mermaid misses her fins. The puddle is dingy and smells of decay. She is loosely wrapped in something brown and saggy. It keeps slipping off of her, and her fingers are bleeding in places from holding on to the material too tightly. Rolling is hard to do, but somehow she manages it. Eventually she makes it back up onto the edges of her not fins. Movement forward is tricky and weird sometimes. She has no clue how long she has been on the surface. All she knows for sure is that there is no longer anything for her down under the surface of the ocean’s cresting waves. 

She has been trying to go northward, but there is no telling if she really is. The sea can be easy to navigate. Land is not. She spends more moments splayed on the ground, trying to make progress forward than actually making any headway. The giant ball of fire that sits in the sky has risen and fallen too many times for her to count. When it starts to fall from its high perch, she has been trying her best to not be found out in the open. 

For some reason, the shuffling monsters of rotten humanity don’t come near her. It is probably her scent. Down below the rolling waves of a green painted sea, she attracted the most monsters of her infected people. Up here though, Mermaid is left alone. There is peace around her. It’s broken by moments of painful noise and the spatter of body matter, but it is peace, none the less. 

Her stomach rumbles and Mermaid searches around her for something she could possibly eat. She has very little knowledge of the cuisine that the surface dwellers enjoy. The little bit she does know, is that they like to slaughter innocent fishes for their consumption. She is not going to trail her fingers in the surf and catch little golden fishes. No matter how hungry she might be. 

Her not fins sweep her up, and she finds herself in front of a crooked little door that is cracked open. No one is inside and she quickly stumbles across the threshold. The door is hard to bar with her blood slick fingers, but eventually she’s triumphant and the wooden slat slams into its home. It took Mermaid several different trials to figure out, first, what the wooden slats were for and then how to use them to keep her safe from anyone who might want to chase after her. Now that she has gotten used to the idea, she’s uncomfortable if she tries to stay in a place without the option for barring the entrances and exits. 

The tiny house is dim. She doesn’t like trying to make fire but she needs it to see. On a small table, she finds the shiny, spark rock that she has gotten used to looking for on her journeys into the abodes of those, hopefully, already dead. It takes several good strikes against the side of the table for the spark rock to create a little lick of orange that consumes the tip of her prodding stick. 

The lick of orange leaps from the prodding stick to the bed of consumables she has moved to the curvature indented into one wall of the house. In moments the little lick multiplies. Mermaid adds more food for the flames to eat up until it’s steady and flickering, the glow of warm light bouncing everywhere.

After the fire settles into itself, she moves slowly around the little house. The shelves carved into one of the other walls holds several heavy squares filled with sheaves of something thin and yellowy white. The sheaves are pressed into thickly with blocky characters that mimic words. Mermaid can’t read them, so she drags the squares near the fire for fuel late. Minutes after she places them near the fire, she finds a soft lump of something material like. It is silky to the touch, and when she stretches out on it all her thoughts stop rushing in her head. She’s asleep just like that. 

*~*~*~*~*

The deer scatter across the field. They are streaks of brown and white, still one moment and gone the next. Belle watches, transfixed, as they bound away from her and blend into the tree line. She is alone and even the deer aren’t inclined to keep her company. What she wouldn’t give for someone to talk to. 

The world is quieter than she would have ever imagined it to be. The only noises to be heard are those that Mother Nature makes and the occasional disturbance from the human like creatures that occasionally roam the roads aimlessly. She stays away from the toll roads and the paths with heavy wear covering them because she doesn’t want to attract unwanted attention. The things have a monstrous appetite.

Belle sags down onto the carpet of springy meadow grass that peppers the field in spots of lush and fragrant pale greens. She doesn’t want to think about the horrors her travels have brought to the tips of her boot covered feet, but the grass is so soft and her body beings to uncoil. It melts into the blades of grass tickling the skin of her back through the thin fabric of her most recently acquired summer clothing, and her thoughts start to wander.

Back, what must have been ten or fifteen villages ago, She’d finally run into other people like her. Survivors. The group was populated with children and middle aged men. There was only one woman in the crowd and the sight of her made Belle’s back tense, molding her posture into something stiff and unmovable. The woman didn’t speak to any of the others moving around her in the throng of the never stalling caravan, and her gaze kept wandering off into the distance. Belle wasn’t sure why the woman seemed so lost in the middle of such a bustling and lively bunch. For the first time in weeks she was afraid to let her leather clad feet graze the ground far below her perch.

The men caught a glance of her hiding place up in the trees and made waving motions in her direction before changing the movement of their herd to cross paths with her. Belle thought about shimmying from the thick branch under her hands to the waiting boughs of the other trees crowded near by. Something was unnerving about these people and it would be best if she just slunk away into the slowly dimming light of twilight. She was so lonely though.

If she could go forever without having to relive that night again it wouldn’t matter that everyone’s either dead or gone round the bin. That doesn’t mean her thoughts stop tiptoeing down the threads of memory that have woven themselves together in remembrance of that night. The clouds gather up above her and Belle doesn’t notice them rolling together, contemplating to drown the world with the tears of their own sorrows. She’s too caught up in running for her life in a memory that holds no weight now.

*~*~*~*~*

Sultan is standing guard over the threshold of their current resting stop. The barn is derelict and caved in in spots, but it is safe enough for them at the moment. Cinderella casts one last glance at the stray before perching on the edge of a giant wooden spool. Her left arm is hurting pretty fiercely from the gash she torn into it while running from the walking dead not even a day ago. 

It takes several minutes of rummaging through the pockets of her dress to find her small sewing kit. She found it in an empty farm house many, many days ago, and it’s come in handy plenty of times. The skin around the gash is slightly red and weepy, but there’s nothing Cinderella can really do about that except wash out the wound again with more water from her spare skin. 

The needle’s prick is expected. It still hurts like hell, and she has to clench her jaw tightly just to get through the pain. The ragged edges of skin have to be mended together again though, so she continues on threading tiny threads of cat gut through the holes the needle creates in her skin. 

Her patchmenship is sloppier than usual. The black of the thread zigs and zags in stumbles of a shaky line that crawls up the side of her arm. It makes her look like one of the rag dolls her mother used to sew for her when she was only a little girl, not even tall enough to peek around her father’s knees when he’d crouch in front of her. 

After drizzling some more water on the stitching for a moment to wash any excess blood away, she wraps her arm back up into the makeshift sling she has hanging around her neck. The walking dead can track the scent of spilled blood, so they can’t stay in the barn for very much longer. Cinderella finds her traveling stick propped against the door jam near Sultan’s rump. The dog slowly pads to its feet, shaking dust from it fur as it does so, before nosing its head out past the crack in the door. 

Several minutes later, Sultan turns and nudges into her calf for a moment before trotting out into the morning sunlight. They walk for most of the day. There are burnt out husks of houses littering the surround countryside and no one living to be seen for miles. The birds are silent in the trees and not even the wind tries to make an appearance. 

Around dusk, they trot up to an old tree and Cinderella slumps against it. Her arm is achy from being jostled for most of the day. She decides to just rest for the night under the tree. Sultan wanders up into her lap when she’s finally seated as comfortably as possible. Her good hand searches in another pocket for the last hard crust of dried biscuit they found three mornings ago. She breaks it in half and shares it with Sultan, who does his best not to slobber all over her hand.

Her hurt arm stays in the sling, if only because Sultan curls up tighter in her lap and falls into a light doze. The dog’s as gentle as possible, but he can get squirmy and her arm can’t take the movement right now. She’s hoping they can find someplace safe to stay soon. The summer’s nearly over, and even if she’s travelling west the winter will surely catch up with her eventually.

*~*~*~*~*

The sky’s rolling and it makes Mermaid nervous. The clouds move with such a liquid grace. Her memory supplies her with images of the underside of waves, crashing and cresting, during her explorations when the weather would turn testy and mean. The quick shake of her head dislodges the memory and she stumbles into the deserted street of a long abandoned village. 

Off in the distance is a wide expanse of tall, seaweed colored strands of what must be what the humans used to call grass. The world beyond the tiny, crumbling village is vast and open with trees only dotting the very edges of the scenery. It’s beautiful in a way that Mermaid can’t understand; the clouds filtering the sunlight down over the seaweed colored grass in patches of yellow that skitters and bounces through the strands in a dance of shadow and light that’s more dazzling than when the sun used to break into fragments under the surface of the ocean’s foamy surface. 

Thick, heavy drops of water start splating down everywhere around her and she slowly makes her way to one of the little house like objects. She’s finally getting used to her not fins. They hurt some times though, especially after she’s pressed onward over little pebbles that look like broken clamshells. There was one day where she had to hole up in an empty place just to pull out the small pieces of clamshell like pebbles that were embedded into the flesh of her not fins. Her blood had slipped down her wrist while she worked the shards out. After that, Mermaid steered clear of anything that reminded her of broken clamshells.

The water pours down around the little house. It sounds like the chorus of a thousand ocean crickets playing in tandem and Mermaid drops down to the grimy floor of the house. Her thoughts are the colors of sea moss and brain matter, flitting from one memory to the next. Some of them are happy memories. Like the time her sisters spun her round and round and they all giggled and laughed; their voices bubbling up and popping in cascades of joy and mirth over their happy heads. Others are things she’s rather not think on. Like the moment she realized her father was infected and wasn’t going to get better, his blood leaking from his split lip only to be caught by the current and drifted away from him.

The thoughts start to cycle faster and faster behind her eyelids and she can’t take anymore of it. Her eyes snap open and she’s up on her not fins and out the door of the little house in seconds. The water’s still pouring around her and it soaks her cloth covering instantly. She doesn’t care. The water reminds her of her home. She’ll never be able to go back. It hurts so much to finally feel the full weight of what that means crashing into her. She’ll never hear her sisters’ pearls of bright laughter again and she’ll never get to hug her father when he comes to wake her and her sisters at dawn. None of that will even happen again, and all she has left are the last memories of them. 

Her not fins take her far away from the abandoned village and she falls to her hands exhausted when she finally stops. Her breath puffs out from her lips in fast, ragged hisses of warm air. She’s as the edge of the empty expanse of seaweed colored grass and the water is only pitter pattering around her slowly. In the distance there is the boom of a noise and she jumps back up onto her not fins. A streak of bright white slithers across the sky’s grey hued clouds and another boom follows closely after. In the distance a dead tree bursts into flame and the orange creeps down the bark and lights onto the tips of the seaweed colored grass. 

The wind stirs the grass and the flames twirl and dance in the breeze, hoping from one strand of grass to the next. The glow of the fire illuminates a shadow laying down on some of the grass in the distance. Mermaid squints to make out the shadow and startles when she realizes it is a real person and not some trick of her imagination. Without thinking, she trudges into the grass to help the person out of danger. 

She trips on something and falls down next to the person. Her left hand accidently smacks into the shoulder of the lady asleep on the crunched down grass and the lady’s eyes snap open. Mermaid scoots back somewhat and watches as the lady sits up and looks around. She tries her best to get the lady’s attention placed on the fire and after several second of tugging, she does. 

After that, they’re both up, racing across the grass back up to the village on the hill. Mermaid leads the lady to the house she was in before and the two of them sag against the door as the water beings to pour down again. They fall asleep leaning against each other as the water douses the flames down to nothing but simmering ashes and the smoldering grey of silently upward twining smoke. 

*~*~*~*~*

The world shifts and tilts for a couple of minutes. It causes Belle to blink her eyes open. She is in a dimly lit place. The sun is crawling through the cracks in the wooden frame, casting shades of warm yellow on everything it can slip over. She’s leaning against the same door she fell onto after fleeing from the burning field. The girl who rescued her is sitting up on the table in front of Belle, swinging her feet while she munches on a stale piece of hard biscuit.

The girl is wearing something hideous that might have been the blanket for a horse before it became her clothing. Belle is sure it can’t be comfortable, so she lifts off the ground and moves towards the open chest in the far corner. The dress she pulls out has rips in it but it’ll do perfectly.

It takes some time to coax the girl into the dress and when Belle finally does the first movement the girl makes is to tug on the hem of the skirt. The girl won’t talk or can’t and Belle has no name to call her. It sounds rude though, to not call the girl something, so she settles on Eau because the girl appeared through the distant rain to find her.

Belle’s not alone anymore and it’s glorious. Eau doesn’t talk but she’ll motion with her hands when Belle says something she doesn’t understand. They’ve taken to curling together when they bed down for the night. Sometimes she’ll wake up to find Eau staring off into the distance, as if she is looking towards the sea that’s so many miles behind them. They both have ghosts trailing in their wakes. They’ve got each other now though. It’s all that matters. Yet, Belle is certain the two of them are missing something. She just doesn’t know what.

*~*~*~*~*

The fall wind blows through the layers of her skirt and Cinderella shivers. Her left arm aches because of the slight chill and from the motions of her shivering. It’s healed finally, but is still tender and weaker than her right arm is. Some days she still wears it in the sling, since it’s easier than dealing with it accidently bumping into anything while she moves her arms through thick forests or when she’s exploring the rooms of farm houses. 

Sultan trots beside her. Occasionally he’ll chase a stray leaf that blows across their path. He mostly sticks by her side though, and Cinderella always sends a prayer up to her mother in heaven, thanking her for sending such a helpful and loyal companion. Her right hand curls around her traveling stick tighter and she pressed forward. She’s looking for something. She just hasn’t found it yet.

In the distance, she can hear the sound of laughter ringing in the air. It’s crisp and full of life in a way that can’t possibly make it real. Yet, somehow it is. There are too many nuances to the laughter to make it only a dream, or a figment of her imagination. That realization moves Cinderella to pick up her pace. She doesn’t even notice the foot falls of her own feet. She’d taken to counting her steps months back so she wouldn’t think of anything sad or sullen. 

The laughter stops for a moment, only to pick up again sometime later. This time it’s louder than even and Cinderella skids a stop on the outskirts of a clearing. Sultan, by her side, stops as well and sits down on her soft shoes. He makes no move to growl in the direction of the clearing. 

In front of her there are two women sitting around a brightly lit fire gesturing wildly with their hands and laughing with each other. Well, the one on the left is laughing while the one on the right shakes with the movement of silent laughter. For the longest they don’t notice her. Sultan barks once jovially, and both their heads whip towards her and Sultan. 

Cinderella’s not sure if she should go forward or not. Sultan butts his head against her calf and does his best to push her towards the two women. The one of the left gets up to stand and she’s older than Cinderella while the woman on the right, who is certainly younger than her, stays seated. 

Sultan never steers her wrong, so Cinderella grips her stick tightly in her right hand, and steps forward towards the two women. The older one walks up to her and starts to talk in an accent that speaks of a western heritage. She can’t understand her beyond maybe one word or perhaps two. When she goes to tell the woman she can’t understand her, the other woman looks at her confused for a moment before tipping her head backwards, laughing up into the sky. 

*~*~*~*~*

And thus this tale must end.

The Belle, The Mermaid, and The Cinder Girl found each other and never let go. And why should they? The adventures they should have had before vanished like wisps of smoke in a stiff breeze. The happily ever afters two of them could have had withered away and died. Perhaps this is not how their tales were to be woven, but this is of little consequence since their stories did not stitch themselves together that way. They have each other instead and that matters far more than what some trite fairytale ending could ever give any of them.


End file.
